Nigeria Is Rebuilding Its National ID System and One Wrong Move Could Exclude Millions
Nigeria has begun one of the most delicate technology transitions in its history: replacing the digital backbone that defines who millions of citizens are in the eyes of the state.
In July 2025, the National Identity Management Commission (NIMC) quietly started migrating the country’s foundational identity infrastructure to the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), an open-source system backed by global development partners. The shift sits at the heart of the World Bank–supported Nigeria Digital Identity for Development (ID4D) program, which has committed over $430 million to modernizing the country’s identity ecosystem.
An additional $83 million system integrator contract is now on the table to deploy NIMS 2.0, Nigeria’s next-generation identity management system, on top of MOSIP.
This is not a routine upgrade. It is a full-scale reconstruction of the digital rails that underpin banking, telecoms, social services, pensions, education, fintech, and e-commerce across Africa’s most populous nation.
And the margin for error is razor-thin.
A System That Now Touches 124 Million People
As of October 2025, NIMC had issued roughly 124 million National Identification Numbers (NINs) to Nigerians and members of the diaspora. That figure reflects explosive growth:
~14 million in 2000
28 million by 2015
114 million in 2024
124 million in 2025
In just a decade, the NIN evolved from a slow-moving registry into a mandatory credential for daily economic life. Lose access to it, and you can lose access to banking, SIM cards, government services, or digital payments.
That reality is what makes this migration uniquely risky: Nigeria is attempting to move 124 million biometric identities, each tied to fingerprints, facial data, and demographic records, into an entirely new technological architecture.
Who Has Been Enrolled and Who Hasn’t
NIMC’s own data highlights both progress and persistent inequality.
Gender split
69.7 million men (56.25%)
54.2 million women (43.7%)
The gap signals ongoing barriers to enrollment for women, especially in rural and underserved areas.
Geographic concentration
Lagos leads with 13.1 million NINs, followed by:
Kano (11.5m)
Kaduna (7.3m)
Ogun (5.12m)
Oyo (4.7m)
At the bottom end are states like Bayelsa, Ebonyi, Ekiti, Cross River, and Taraba, each with enrollment barely crossing the one-million mark.
Diaspora growth
Over 1.53 million Nigerians abroad now hold NINs, another layer of complexity in any mass migration exercise.
All of these identities, unevenly distributed, politically sensitive, and deeply embedded in everyday life, are what NIMC is now attempting to move without disruption.
What MOSIP Actually Changes
MOSIP is not a single application. It is a modular, API-driven identity stack designed to be adapted by governments.
Core components include:
Pre-registration portals
Biometric and demographic capture tools
Automated Biometric Identification Systems (ABIS) to prevent duplicates
Central identity databases
Authentication and verification services
It also supports digital credentials through the Inji app, which allows citizens to store verified IDs, generate QR codes, and authenticate themselves even offline.
In simple terms, MOSIP doesn’t just issue identity numbers. It turns them into usable digital infrastructure that works across services, locations, and connectivity conditions.
Across Africa, roughly a dozen countries are already piloting or deploying MOSIP, with at least nine, such as Morocco, Ethiopia, Togo, and Uganda, at various stages of implementation. Globally, MOSIP reports 26 country engagements.
Nigeria’s deployment, however, would dwarf most of them.
A MOSIP representative in Africa declined to comment on Nigeria’s rollout, citing contractual constraints with NIMC.
The Most Dangerous Phase: Migrating 124 Million Biometric Records
Public procurement filings show NIMC is purchasing thousands of MOSIP-certified enrollment devices and hiring a system integrator to handle deployment, data migration, ABIS integration, and customization.
NIMC confirmed that the migration will be comprehensive, not partial.
“The whole migration process is well thought out, and proper change-management procedures are in place to ensure a seamless transition,” the commission said.
Behind that reassurance lies the most failure-prone operation in digital government: planet-scale data migration.
At this scale, mistakes don’t fail quietly. Errors can create duplicate identities, corrupt biometric templates, or lock legitimate citizens out of essential services overnight.
NIMC says a specialized integrator, unnamed, will manage the process in collaboration with its internal team, following the highest international standards.
Still, technical risk is only part of the story.
When Identity Systems Fail, Entire Economies Feel It
Foundational ID systems concentrate both power and fragility. If authentication fails, banks can’t verify customers, telcos can’t activate SIMs, and welfare systems stall.
Adeboye Adegoke, a digital rights advocate and former senior manager at Paradigm Initiative, is blunt:
NIMC’s antecedents show an organization that has demonstrated gaps it has never fully acknowledged.
For critics, the concern isn’t MOSIP’s design; it’s whether Nigeria’s institutions can execute a transition of this magnitude without repeating past failures.
Vendor-Neutral on Paper, Political in Reality
MOSIP’s open-source promise is vendor neutrality and freedom from proprietary lock-in. But neutrality depends on governance, not just code.
A senior industry insider warns that Nigeria’s identity-verification companies were largely excluded from consultations.
Founders built this industry, employing thousands of Nigerians, the source said. Now a globally backed system is being introduced in a way that sidelines an entire ecosystem.
The insider questions the asymmetry: MOSIP is not used as a national ID platform in the U.S. or U.K., yet it is promoted aggressively across lower-income countries.
The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which supports MOSIP, frames this as enabling open digital public infrastructure. Critics see a familiar power dynamic: global solutions shaping local systems with limited domestic input.
Data Sovereignty Is More Than Hosting Location
One of the most sensitive questions is whether Nigerians’ biometric data could ever leave the country.
MOSIP can be fully hosted locally, but sovereignty is not just about servers.
Policy lawyer Timi Olagunju argues the real risk lies elsewhere:
The challenge with sovereignty is not MOSIP; it’s the problematic nature of NIMC. Downtime and verification failures can’t be solved by software alone.
Operational reality matters. If external vendors, often foreign-run, control critical components, control can quietly drift away from the state.
Cloud alignment adds another layer of risk. MOSIP’s compatibility with providers like Amazon Web Services (AWS) means that without strict data-residency rules, strong IT governance, and independent audits, cloud infrastructure can become a de facto authority over national identity data.
NIMC insists safeguards are in place, citing compliance with the Nigeria Data Protection Act (NDPA) and its ISO 27001:2022 certification.
Yet a deeper oversight question remains: when identity becomes transnational infrastructure, who audits the auditors?
Read More: How to find and quietly unlink phone numbers tied to your NIN (MTN, Airtel, Glo, 9mobile)
Will Nigerians Get MOSIP’s Full Privacy Protections?
MOSIP promotes privacy-by-design features such as
Tokenised identifiers
Minimal-data authentication
Consent-based verification
In practice, many countries deploy only stripped-down versions due to legacy constraints or weak data-protection regimes.
NIMC says Nigeria will not.
The commission will not be downgrading or deploying weak versions of any solution whatsoever.
If fully implemented, tokenization could dramatically reduce how often raw NINs circulate across banks, telcos, and fintechs, cutting identity-theft risks at the source.
The Silence Around Timelines
Despite the scale of the transition, NIMC has not published a public migration roadmap.
When asked about pilots, milestones, or parallel-run plans, the commission said details would be shared in due course.
That opacity carries risk. Nigeria already experiences authentication outages under the current system. Without transparency, citizens and businesses don’t know whether the country is weeks or years away from running two identity stacks side by side.
If NIMC wants to be proactive, they need to explain how they arrived at MOSIP and what safeguards are in place, Adegoke said.
Accountability, When Things Go Wrong
MOSIP provides software. The World Bank provides financing. Integrators provide engineering.
Responsibility, however, remains domestic.
The National Identity Management Commission is the sole body mandated by the constitution for identity management in Nigeria, NIMC said. The commission will not shift her responsibilities to any other body.
That clarity matters because when identity systems fail, the consequences are personal and immediate.
A High-Stakes Bet on Open Digital Infrastructure
Nigeria’s MOSIP migration is both a technological leap and a political wager: that open digital public infrastructure can scale more sustainably than proprietary systems.
If it succeeds, Nigeria could become MOSIP’s most significant real-world deployment. If it fails, the fallout would ripple across banking, telecoms, welfare, and elections.
As Olagunju puts it:
If there’s no local data and skills transfer, NIMC has simply swapped one sovereign system for another.
For others, the warning is sharper:
Giving away your identity infrastructure is not an alternative ever.
For now, the transition continues largely out of public sight. What’s clear is that Nigeria is no longer treating identity as a static registry but as core national infrastructure.
Whether MOSIP strengthens sovereignty or quietly erodes it will depend less on software and more on governance, transparency, and execution in the years ahead.
